Tuesday, May 19, 2015

Long before Adrian Younge fan club member DJ Premier released his PRhyme collabo with Royce da 5'9" exclusively using samples of Younge's recordings, the multi-instrumentalist composer, arranger and producer was already well-known to beatheadz for his brilliant work scoring Scott Sanders' 2009 blaxploitation salute Black Dynamite and the inspired Philly soul update Adrian Younge Presents The Delfonics. Here's a short documentary about Younge and his work that's worth checking.

Since releasing the amazing faux-giallo soundtrack Twelve Reasons To Die with Ghostface Killah and companion instrumentals set on Rza's Soul Temple label back in 2013, Younge has been hard at work building his own Linear Labs operation on the down low. To preview the four impressive albums he has slated for 2015, Younge assembled the Los Angeles label sampler now available on CD, LP and as a digital download.

Along with Return Of The Savage (listen below) featuring Ghostface Killah, Raekwon and Rza from the upcoming Twelve Reasons To Die II album, there's the Memories Of War collabo with Stereolab chanteuse Laetitia Sadier off the forthcoming 'Something About April II and a joint called Feel Alive voiced by Karolina and Loren Oden from The Midnight Hour concept album Younge created with Ali Shaheed Muhammad. Additionally, the vinyl version of Los Angeles comes with the bonus track Sirens II (which you can hear in a stripped-down version below) from Bilal's next solo album.

For those playing catch-up, the Los Angeles sampler also includes 1969 Organ from Younge’s 2000 debut Adrian Younge Presents Venice Dawn, Panic (Ali Shaheed Muhammad Remix) from last year's Souls of Mischief / Ali Shaheed Muhammad album, There Is Only Now Remix, The Sure Shot (Parts 1 & 2) which is an instrumental lifted from the Twelve Reasons To Die sessions, To Be Your One from the aforementioned Delfonics set and finally, there's Chicago Wind featuring Toni Scruggs from the Black Dynamite soundtrack. If your local record retailer doesn't stock Linear Labs releases, you can order Los Angeles directly from the label right here.

FYI: Raekwon returns to Toronto to present the music from his new album Fly International Luxurious Art – which could've greatly benefitted from Younge's musical input – at the Phoenix on Friday.

Six Organs of Admittance idea man Ben Chasny isn't content to merely be outstanding in his field.

Six Organs of Admittance's Ben Chasny has devised his very own system of musical composition, The Hexadic System, which is the basis for his latest album, Hexadic, which Drag City issued back in February.

How The Hexadic System came to be...
Ben Chasny's restless intellect has regularly guided the progress of his creation. A lyrical mastery of acoustic finger-picking would be enough to build a body of work for most musicians; this is just the stepping-off point for Ben. From the earliest days of private-press psych home recordings, Six Organs of Admittance has sought out alternative spaces in which to make music and challenge audiences to keep up with his rapid advances into new terrain. Over the last two years Ben assembled a comprehensive system of musical composition. Designed to free sound and language from rational order and replace calculation with indeterminacy, The Hexadic System is a catalyst to extinguish patterns and generate new means of chord progressions and choices.

Though it was not his intention upon creating this unique system, the structures generated were so compelling, that they soon became the bones of the next Six Organs record. This is the longest time between Six Organs records since Ben started making them in 1998. This is also why Hexadic sounds unlike anything else made this year, and generally unlike most other things made ever.

The System builds all of the tonal fields, chord changes, scales, and lyrics on Hexadic, creating the framework of the songs that the musicians engage with. Yet the System is open; within the framework, Chasny's own personal aesthetics - such as the production mode of loud guitars, the order of songs, the editing of length, were all conscious decisions made to communicate the pieces. The exact same combinatorial patterns used on this record would generate infinite results, depending on the choices of the individual. Ben's years of study have produced an operational agent that has not only built all the songs on Hexadic but is also a system anyone can use to restructure their ways of habit.

With a desire to provoke the unconscious and spring past the strictures and limits of the conscious mind, this was the goal: to use the System to make heavy music with as few "heavy" signifiers as possible. The ones that are left: Volume. Distortion. Impact! This is Hexadic: the sound of the System in the hands of Six Organs of Admittance.

Here's some footage of Six Organs of Admittance raging full-on at The Boot & Saddle in Philadelphia last week prefaced by a clip of a much more introspective Ben Chasny performing the placid Lisboa at London's Café OTO back in October.